The Virginian

Friday, April 28, 2017

In an unpublished manuscript, former President Barack Obama and a friend wrote that America is a “racist society” that pushes an ideology that infects the minds of whites and blacks.

Pulitzer Prize winning author David Garrow is set to reveal information about this unpublished book in his upcoming biography “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.”

In an interview on the Jamie Weinstein Show released Wednesday, Garrow opened up about his upcoming book and told Weinstein, “I think that people irrespective of their political views or partisan identification will be astonished. I cannot say that too strongly. Will be profoundly astonished by how much important substance of Barack Obama’s life has not previously been known and that’s not in a negative context necessarily at all.”

Who's the racist?

Race relations severely deteriorated during Obama’s two terms. Is it Obama that is the real racist?

If present trends continue Russia will be more Christian than the West in another few decades.

Reading past Politico's anti-Right and anti-Christian (a "must" for Liberalism) this is interesting and would have been unthinkable 50 years ago when the official religion of the USSR was militant atheism.

In Western Europe the great churches are mostly tourist attractions and Western culture is fast declining because multiculturalism trumps tradition for opinion leaders. The most steadfast in the faith are Muslims who will soon outnumber the natives of the countries they have migrated to.

In the U.S. the popular culture equates Christianity and Islam as equally bad and religion the cause of all conflict.

Ling Bing, the women’s basketball team coach at Huazhong University of Science and Technology of Central China, posted a photo of team members carrying the banner online, The New York Times reported [April 20].

Upon receiving backlash for posting the picture, Ling noted what he perceived to be a “double standard” — gay students flaunt rainbow flags at graduation, but the banner held by his basketball team was deemed wrong, as reported by The New York Times.

Thursday, April 27, 2017

You complain about “fake news,” but you, more than anyone and anything, have contributed to that phenomenon with your constant failure to report objectively, your inability to report on the story without sticking your political dick into it, your outright contempt for your audiences, and your intentional and sometimes malicious obfuscation. These egregious misdeeds are well-documented. Your inability to accurately report the story without snark or subjective garbage has made you something to be derided. The public trust in what you dish out is at an all time low.

Are you really surprised that people seek out other sources of information? And are you really shocked when they begin to believe whatever they’re fed – even by ignorant, uninformed bloggers with their own agendas – as long as it’s not through you? Is it any wonder that any number of fake, misleading, biased sites have popped up to fill the void? You suck at your job, so someone else has to do it – no matter how poorly!

You twist words. You omit critical information. You conceal your own opinions in a torrent of word salad, and try and mask it as factual reporting. You obfuscate. You insert inflammatory language into a straight news report to elicit a certain reaction.

Take this current example from NPR. From the very title and first paragraph, not only do we know what the writer feels on the topic of Trump extending a program to afford veterans an opportunity to seek health care from private doctors, but we can also see how said writer tries to shape the reader’s opinion on the topic!

Trump Extends Troubled VA Program That Pays Private Doctors

Yeah, let’s make private doctors seem like a negative, dirty phrase, instead of an opportunity to choose for those who have made significant sacrifices for our country, and are now stuck in a broken, corrupt VA system.

It’s a fix that hasn’t fixed much, but the troubled Veterans Choice program has been extended anyway.

Hasn’t fixed much, according to whom? The author, who quite obviously hates it that veterans have a choice, and is taking the opportunity to slam the administration?

Veterans Choice is designed to allow veterans who have waited more than 30 days for an appointment at a VA facility, or who live more than 40 miles from one, instead to get care from private providers who then bill the VA. But it has been plagued with problems. Many vets complain that Choice actually makes getting care more difficult and time-consuming, and some health care providers have dropped out due to slow payments or administrative hassles.

“Plagued with problems.” Because that’s not inflammatory language or anything!

“Many vets complain.” How many? I checked a Facebook page for Veterans’ complaints about the program itself. There were fewer than 20 since March, 2016. A January 2017 IG report detailed some of the problems investigators found with the program, including VC’s inadequate network of providers (I’m guessing due to the VA having 90 days to implement choice, which for a government bureaucracy is daunting, to say the least), and lack of strong oversight into payments for participating providers.

While, NPR derps about “many vets complaining,” it doesn’t provide actual numbers, nor does it note that only 13 percent of eligible veterans actually took advantage of the program, according to the IG report!

By omitting contextual information and using obviously inflammatory language to obliquely condemn the Trump Administration for having extended the program, the NPR undermined its own credibility in a transparent attempt to influence reader opinion on the issue.

“What you saw coming out of the press releases about climate data, climate analysis, was, I’d say, misleading, sometimes just wrong,” Koonin said, referring to elements within the Obama administration he said were responsible for manipulating climate data.

And every lie gets re-printed on the front page of the Virginian Pilot. They're no more gullible than the average scientific illiterate that works for the media, they're just true believers in the Church of Global Warming.

Like her mother before her, Chelsea Clinton appears to be creating a cottage industry for herself in receiving random awards for her unparalleled contributions to society, scintillating takes on current events, and incredibly generous heart.

Not content with just her Variety-sponsored “achievement award,” Chelsea on Tuesday night accepted the annual City Harvest Award for Commitment in fighting hunger in New York City.

Before we claim that she’s done nothing to earn a major award, aside from sitting in a privileged position atop her family’s namesake foundation, or say that she has few actual commitments aside from spending her family’s money and attending a single board meeting for Expedia lest she forfeit the several hundred thousand dollars she earns in her honorary position, in this case, it appears Chelsea did do at least something to earn her award.

On a single day in 2017, she helped City Harvest pack some grapefruit.

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

In 1970, when Earth Day was conceived, the late George Wald, a Nobel laureate biology professor at Harvard University, predicted, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist and best-selling author of “The Population Bomb,” declared that the world’s population would soon outstrip food supplies.

In an article for The Progressive, he predicted, “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years.”

He gave this warning in 1969 to Britain’s Institute of Biology: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

On the first Earth Day, Ehrlich warned, “In 10 years, all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.”

Despite such predictions, Ehrlich has won no fewer than 16 awards, including the 1990 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ highest award.

Read the whole thing.

Let me tell you what science is. It is research into nature. In chemistry, my specialty, it's the ability to combine elements and molecules to produce a new compound. It could be new and unique or it could be a repeat of an old experiment. But if it's done right it will always get the same result. A chemist will predicts that if you combine A and B under stated conditions you will always get C. If his prediction does not come true he will change his mind and admit that he failed. In the so-called "science" of global warming predictions have proven to be totally and utterly wrong. However the fake "scientists" get more money and their past failures are ignored. Instead they get prizes and awards.

Saturday, April 22, 2017

“The Evil of Postmodernism.”

Jordan Peterson is the Canadian psychology professor who declined last September to employ — as directed by his university administration — transgender pronouns when addressing students in his classroom who wanted not to be he or she.

Thursday, April 20, 2017

Mark Steyn on multiculturalism

Ann Coulter uses the Wayback Machine to tell us how the Sierra Club sold it's soul $100 million.

Who knew that they had a soul to sell?

In celebration of Earth Day this Saturday, let's review how the Sierra Club sold its soul and screwed the Earth for a $100 million donation. They must hate themselves for it, so why shouldn't we hate them, too?

After Teddy Kennedy's 1965 immigration act began dumping millions of Third-Worlders on the country, the Sierra Club talked of little else besides reducing immigration.

For those who wonder what people are talking about when they refer to Gramscian plans or Gramscian ideas, here's a great explanation.

One of the most interesting aspects of the study of history is that very often men born in the most humble of circumstances nevertheless rise up to affect the course of human history dramatically. They may be men of action or men of thought, yet in either case their activities can father tremendous changes across the years. Antonio Gramsci was both a man of action and thought and, whatever the outcome of the events of the next several decades, he will almost certainly be reckoned by future historians to have been a remarkable figure.

Born in obscurity on the island of Sardinia in 1891, Gramsci would not have been considered a prime candidate to impact significantly the 20th century. Gramsci studied philosophy and history at the University of Turin, and soon became a dedicated Marxist, joining the Italian Socialist Party. Immediately after the First World War, he established his own radical newspaper, The New Order, and shortly afterwards helped in the founding of the Italian Communist Party.

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

I have argued that we of the Hard Right should not actively seek open confrontation with the enemies of our culture. I have tried to advocate for a legal, ethical procedure to rid our communities of those who would wish us harm, as I find that preferable to bloodshed. In the comments, we have repeatedly argued back and forth about what has to happen, with some positing that we should not eschew violence so readily (and I realize that no one is calling for wholesale genocide or anything like that).

Honestly, I still hope and pray that this can be resolved as peacefully as possible, but I am beginning to have my doubts that it can happen. Not because our side is not willing to follow this path, but because the other side is doing everything they can to force our hand.

It reminds me of the climactic scene in the Tom Selleck movie Quigly Down Under, where the evil land baron, played by Alan Rickman, forces Quigly to face him in a gun fight. Quigly, known for his sharpshooter skills with a rifle, has repeatedly stated that he had little use for handguns, leading Rickman’s character to wrongly assume that Quigly is not proficient with one. Of course, Quigly is quite capable, killing the bad guy. As the evil man lies dying, Quigly points out, “I said I never had much use for one. Never said I didn’t know how to use it.” (See the video clip below).

It seems to me that a similar scenario is being played out in real life.

Look, the Hard Right has no desire to fight in the streets. No sane person wants to live in a society where there is constant, realistic expectations of ongoing bloodshed. That is why we advocate the removal of undesirables. We do not want to kill anyone. We want them to simply go away. Go home. Go back where you came from. Just leave us alone. In fact, if there is an overarching theme to the Hard Right position, it is that we just want to be left alone to live our lives as we see fit.

Unfortunately, the left has horribly misread the situation. Rather than realize the superiority of our position, they have chosen to bring the fight to us. They have mistaken our forbearance to this point for weakness. That is dead wrong. It is not that we are not capable. It is that we do not want open conflict. But if we are forced into a corner, all hell is going to break loose, and the left is not going to like the result.

It is each person’s legal right, in this country, to assemble peaceably. This is true for both right and left. But if the other side is going to incite violence, I can categorically state that the Hard Right is more than able to finish the fight.

I pray the left realizes this before it is too late. If their past performance is any indication, however, they are going to have to learn this the hard way.

Epic gun fights

Bolton found more hard truths to be learned in North Korea, where he said there was no doubt that “because of eight years of the Obama administration doing nothing, under the guise of a policy they called ‘strategic patience,’ which was really a synonym for doing nothing, North Korea is perilously close to having the capability to put a nuclear device under the nose cone of an ICBM and land it on the United States.”

Federal regulators were instructed to keep a massive fraud investigation under wraps until a day after a controversial vote to expand a program that was allegedly used to bilk taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars, one those regulators claims.

Democrats in a public, political meeting cheer and laugh at the mention of the increased number of white men committing suicide.

The speaker says, maybe I should not say this in public, but when I heard more White men are committing suicide, I almost said “yeah, great!”.

But he does say it, and the crowd likes it, as he knew they would.

The speaker knows that he is talking about a group that has no organized capacity to oppose his despicable, dehumanizing, eliminationist hate speech. Attacking those who are not (yet) organized to resist is easy and fun.

About which other ethno-cultural community is it permitted to laugh and clap when they die by their own hands in larger numbers?

The despair that leads to this horrible increase in suicides is a gauge of the success of the policies the people in this video espouse. They are jeering over a defeated enemy. So for this crowd laughter and clapping is appropriate.

Monday, April 17, 2017

Communism... always one genocide away from Utopia.

Communism... always one genocide away from Utopia. The abuse, violent assault, torture and execution of thought criminals is their essential philosophy. But hey, they mean well and that makes it all okay!

Sunday, April 16, 2017

You can find many timelines that follow allegations of Russia tampering in the U.S. election and alleged involvement of Trump officials. But I couldn’t find any comprehensive timelines cross-referencing Obama-era surveillance of whistleblowers, journalists and other U.S. citizens with Russia surveillance allegations. So I built one.

If you want to know how badly Obama and his henchmen (and henchwomen) spied on Americans in violation of the law, Attkinson creates a list. It's only a partial list that will lengthen and involve more criminals as more information comes to light.

At what point will the people who commit really big crimes against the people be brought to answer and held accountable? Because right now the American people realize that government officials seem to be exempt from laws that send the ordinary citizen to jail. This systematic differentiation between he ruling class and the peasant class is corrosive of democracy. It destroys faith in the fairness of laws. In many respects an ordered society depends on the voluntary acceptance of rules that govern all of us. When it becomes apparent that there is an political aristocracy that does not have to obey the rules; that literally gets away with murder, the glue that holds a free society together dissolves. If you can't trust the authorities, you have to trust the people around you who look like you and think like you. You join a gang for self-protection. That's the point at which tribal warfare breaks out.

I suggest we start to think about a tribunal like the Nuremberg Trials that exposed the war crimes of the Nazis in World War 2. That may the the only way that the American people will regain their trust in the integrity of the American government.

...foremost in our minds will be how readily the government’s awesome intelligence capabilities can be abused. That is the real significance of the controversy over Obama-administration spying on the Trump campaign and transition.

The scandal that CNN is hell-bent on ignoring brings into sharp relief the very abuses the media, echoing civil-liberties activists, have warned against for years: pretextual uses of intelligence-collection powers to spy on political opponents and dissenters. As a national-security conservative with no illusions about government, I’ve acknowledged these concerns. I’ve countered, though, that the powers are, yes, essential to national security. The abuse of power is thus a reason to get rid of the abuser, not the power.

In our modern political dysfunction, that seems impossible. Washington protects its own. No one gets fired anymore, let alone impeached. So just as we make war on “terror” because we don’t want to identify the enemy, we condemn “power” because we can’t bring ourselves to hold the rogue officials accountable.

Did the Obama administration have compelling foreign-intelligence reasons to monitor its political opponents? Or was Russian espionage mainly a cover for political spying?

As I’ve said before, there is enough risk on both sides that I doubt we will get definitive answers to these questions. There is little doubt, however, that Republicans and Democrats will mutually find intelligence-collection power to be a convenient scapegoat. That’s where this is heading: the showdown over FISA reauthorization.

So can we trust the government with this power? It is worth remembering that, before someone decided that the perilous complexities of the modern world left us with no choice but to trust the government, we built a governing system on the premise that it can’t be trusted.

The American experiment in democracy has always meant that a new administration did not use it's police powers to jail members of the previous administration as a means of stifling dissent. We are not supposed to jail our political opponents. That's what "banana republics" do and we're supposed to be better than that. The Civil War was an exception, and it was the losers of the election that started the conflict.

But at some point the issues become so egregious that things have to be done. What's interesting is that it's the Democrats, who - like their counterparts in 1860 - dispute the validity of the election. They do it under the pretext that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin conspired to steal 2016 election. They insist that interference with an election is so serious that it's an act of war.

But if interference in an election - working to steal an election - is a form of warfare, should we not take their word for it that it's serious enough to put the people responsible in jail? Even if the people responsible are officials of the previous government? And even if they did not actually succeed in stealing an election but are using information collected by spying to undermine a legitimately elected administration?

If Donald Trump really wanted to shake Washington up and "Drain the Swamp" that would be one way he could do it. Send a few of the top criminals to jail and there would be fewer government officials who would commit these crimes.

Trump is not part of the government power elite. He's an outsider who does not owe allegiance to the government ruling class of either party. He has set himself up in opposition to them. There is a large and steadfast core of people in the country who agree with his position. They are beginning to emerge across the country, even in places like Berkeley, demonstrating that after being subjected to physical attacks in the past they will not be silenced nor intimidated by America's Red Guards. They will fight back, eagerly.

If we do not want to see this issue settled by bloody clashes in the streets, I suggest that settling it in court may be better for the country and for the safety of the country. Trump would be doing the country a favor by breaking the understanding that the ruling class has and actually sending some of them to jail.

Thursday, April 13, 2017

Like the old "Conventional Wisdom Watch" feature in Newsweek, the arrow next to son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner is pointing upward and the arrow beside top strategist and house ideologue Stephen Bannon is pointing downward.

The left’s endgame is a totalitarian state. Its “moderates” pursue one by peaceful means only so long as they are allowed to hijack the system. When an election fails to go their way, the radicals brandish it as proof that the system has failed and that violent revolution is the only answer.

But what was once the obscure behavior of a deranged political fringe has become the mainstream politics of the Democrats. The Resistance theme shows that the radicals have won. The Democrats haven’t just fallen to the left. They have fallen to the radical left which believes in overthrowing our system of government through conflict and confrontation rather than covertly engineering change.

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

John Nolte itemizes the way that the media is keeping the nation divided by forcing conservatives to violate their conscience. read the whole thing.)

Everything listed above is not only an unreasonable demand made by the left and their media, it is an immoral one and one intentionally designed to take away our right to be left alone, to be indifferent, to live and let live.

Because the left and their media now target our children, our personal space, our religious conscience, and how we express ourselves through speech -- we are forced to care, forced to take a side, forced into a toxic debate we would prefer to avoid.

You see, now that America is for the most part colorblind and indifferent to cultural and lifestyle differences, these phony controversies, these criminal martyrs, and absurd demands are all manufactured and ginned up as a means to keep the Jenga Tower scared, feeling victimized, outraged, bitter and voting against their own interests -- a bigger welfare state, worse public schools, more illegal aliens taking their jobs, and more poorly vetted refugees.

Good grief, these toxic freaks are now demanding married men invite their female subordinates out for a private dinner.

It is not that we are being told we cannot do something, which is easier on the conscience. Rather, we are being forced, coerced, and bullied into actions and attitudes that wound our conscience.

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Syrian suspicions

Forgive me if I allow my suspictions of what we know and when we know it to interfere with the good feeling that most of us have about Trump's decision to bomb the Syrian air base in response to a chemical attack.

As I said in a comment recently:

If Assad is responsible, this will change his mind. But ...

And here is Scott Adams, who has been more right than anyone I know about Trump back to when he first announced his candidacy. He points out that Trump exaggerates. Even his supporters - and I am one - do not take him literally. We know when he exaggerates for effect. But we take him seriously. (When he said he was "wiretapped" and he was called a bald faced liar by the press it was the press that was wrong.) His detractors say that he's a serial liar. But he's believed in this instance, because people want this to be true.

The odd exception to our universal understanding of President Trump’s mode of operation is his claim that he is totally certain Assad was responsible for the chemical attack on his own people last week. The President’s critics and most of his supporters believe President Trump when he suggests that our military can track any plane in Syria and know what that plane did to whom.

Do you believe that?

I have it on good authority that the United States can track and identify aircraft in Syria. But does that mean we are watching (or recording) every plane at every minute, and we also know what ordinance they dropped?

Do you believe, for example, that our military can identify Syrian jets doing a normal bombing run at the same time as a hobby-sized ISIS drone drops some sarin gas in the blast zone? Can our satellites see that?

Or suppose rebels lobbed an artillery shell with sarin into a village that was being bombed at the same time. Would our satellites and drones and AWACS pick up the incoming round?

Maybe.

But my experience of life is that literally nothing works that well.

Or to put it another way, if we could do shit like that, the war would be over in a week. We’d know who every player on the ground was, and what they were doing, at all times. Heck, if we can detect a hobby-sized drone with a gas canister strapped to its belly from outer space, we don’t need boots-on-the-ground to beat ISIS. We can kill everyone who needs killing from the sky.

Like Adams, I question whether Assad actually is responsible. The events look staged and remind me of the theatrical productions that the Palestinians produced to make them look like the victims of the Israelis. This is too much like "suicide by cop" on the part of Assad who was winning without chemical weapons.

I also suspect that Trump knows this but is willing to play along by bombing a single airbase. As a result, Assad has lost little. The American people get a new respect for a powerful leader. The Democrats and the press (but I repeat myself) are rallying to his actions and the Loony-Left-Resistance is pulling up its shorts. Putin is shown to be running a second rate power. China wonders what will happen if they don't rein in North Korea. And the "Trump-Conspired-With-Putin-to-steal-the-election" look foolish. And Obama is neutered. Better yet, they are admitting that they lied about their "success" in removing WMDs from Syria.

Monday, April 10, 2017

George Carlin - Political Correctness is fascism pretending to be Manners..

In today's Virginian Pilot, Dick Meyer does a cut-and-paste job on an article printed in the Atlantic about increased mortality among "uneducated" white Americans dying of alcohol and drug abuse.

He ends with this:

Politics makes for an especially depressing subplot of the current mystery. In the last election, Donald Trump preyed on losses experienced by the white working class, offered no honest prescriptions and no realistic course of treatment. Instead, Trump and his party exploited the pain of the white working class — and some better educated, wealthier whites that feel and remember their pain — and channeled into resentment and anger at blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, immigrants as well as the “establishment” elite who rig the system.

That is a prescription that ensures no one will get better.

The new word for acknowledging people's issues is "PREYING" if those issues affect the low-skilled white working class and if the one who is paying attention is Donald Trump.

Bill Clinton was hailed by clowns like Meyer when he famously used and re-used the phrase "I feel your pain." But let Trump feel the pain of the people like Meyer despises - white men without a college degree - and it's "preying." And since Donald Trump, a few months into his Presidency has not solved this problem he's "preying."

Let me buy Dick Meyer a hint: the despair of white men without a college degree is caused by joblessness because factories that once employed them have closed and moved their jobs to Mexico and to China. This was done by the Establishment to fatten the bottom lines of corporations and promoted by the Washington Establishment who made trade deals that erased the jobs of millions of American men without a college degree.

So when Donald Trump made speech after speech promising to bring those jobs back he gave hope to the hopeless and reduced their despair. We have, mere months into the Trump administration, seen large corporations like Ford announce major investments in factories in this country.

People like Meyer are sightless because they will not see; they are blinded by their own political biases. Like Meyer and the rest of the press, they are Democrat operatives with bylines. These are the people who wear elitist, bigoted and racist blinders. Thank God, they are going to be left in the dustpan of history.

Thursday, April 06, 2017

The Susan Rice bombshell at least explains why the Democrats won't stop babbling about Russia. They need a false flag to justify using national intelligence agencies to snoop on the Trump team.

Every serious person who has tried to locate any evidence that Russia attempted to influence the 2016 election -- even Trump-haters at the New York Review of Books and Rolling Stone magazine -- has come away empty-handed and angry. We keep getting bald assertions, unadorned with anything resembling a fact.

But for now, let's just consider the raw plausibility of the story.

The fact-less claim is that (1) the Russians wanted Donald Trump to win; and (2) They thought they could help him win by releasing purloined emails from the Democratic National Committee showing that the Democrats were conspiring against Hillary Clinton's primary opponent, Bernie Sanders.

First, why on earth would Russia prefer a loose cannon, untested president like Trump to an utterly corrupt politician, who'd already shown she could be bought? The more corrupt you think Russia is, the more Putin ought to love Hillary as president.

The Russians knew Hillary was a joke from her ridiculous "reset" button as secretary of state. They proceeded to acquire 20 percent of America's uranium production, under Hillary's careful management -- in exchange for a half-million-dollar speaking engagement for her husband and millions of dollars in donations to the Clinton Foundation.

(Politifact rates this claim FALSE! -- LIAR, LIAR PANTS ON FIRE! -- because Trump referred to 20 percent of America's "uranium," not to 20 percent of America's "uranium capacity." This is the sort of serious reporting we get from our watchdog media.)

The last thing our enemies want is unpredictability in an American president, and Trump is nothing if not unpredictable. Actually, that's only the second-to-last thing Putin wants. Russia's only export is energy: The last thing Putin wants is a president who vows to drill and frack, driving down the world oil price.

But let's say the Russians were morally offended by a woman who could be bought (by them) for a $500,000 speaking fee, and what they really longed for was a bellicose American president promising to put our interests first.

Why would anyone, least of all trained spies, think that it would help Trump to release emails showing the DNC had its thumb on the scale against Bernie Sanders?

How was that supposed to work again? I forget.

Accepting everything else the most deranged Trump-hater believes, normal people lose the thread of the conspiracy at the moment when the Russians are supposed to have said to themselves, "HEY, I KNOW -- LET'S TRY THIS!”

Even experts in American politics haven't the first idea how to affect an election. The best minds of the GOP bet $140 million of their own money that Jeb! would be the nominee. (Maybe they should have hired Putin.)

Throughout the primaries, Democrats were openly praying that the GOP would nominate Trump. Democrats had the same hope in 1980 for Ronald Reagan. In 2008, Republicans hooted at the idea of Al Franken running for the U.S. Senate.

Days before the election, America's premier journal of liberal opinion, The New York Times, gave Hillary a 91 percent chance of winning. The Princeton Election Consortium calculated her chances at 99 percent. The Huffington Post's polling aggregator put Hillary's odds at 98 percent.

But we're supposed to believe that a country practiced in spycraft was confident that it not only knew what was likely to happen in a U.S. presidential election, but also knew how to swing it? And no one in Moscow thought to ask: "What will be the predictable, certain outcome of releasing the DNC's 'Get Bernie' emails?”

The DNC leaks might have ended up being the best thing that ever happened to the Democrats. What if they had pulled a Torricelli, and forced Hillary to drop out, so they could run Joe Biden instead? Biden is a lot more popular than Hillary!

Isn't the more logical leaker someone within the DNC who'd had enough with David Brock and Debbie Wasserman Schultz steering the party into a ditch? The actual leaker probably thought: I've got to save the party! She's going to destroy us!

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, as well as his associate, former British ambassador Craig Murray, both say that the DNC emails came from a whistleblower within the DNC. Murray has even identified the precise location where a DNC insider passed him the emails -- a park near American University.

Assange may be a misguided zealot, but neither his friends nor his enemies call him a liar. His image is very nearly the opposite: a self-righteousness fanatic -- not a slippery con man.

Hey, did anyone else notice that last week, very quietly, every single staffer at the DNC was fired?

The claim that Russia hacked the DNC's emails to help Trump is the sort of crackpot theory that can only be concocted after the fact.

They would prefer to say that North Korea or ISIS "hacked" our election and somehow installed Trump. But unfortunately, Trump has no business dealings with ISIS or the Pyongyang regime. He -- or people he knows -- have had some vague business dealings with Russia. So the left is stuck with its insane Russia conspiracy.

And now, just as the whole story is collapsing, their need is even more urgent, to distract from the Obama administration's use of national security intelligence-gathering agencies to spy on domestic enemies like Donald Trump.

I wonder how people would react if a Trump-supporting "patriotic dance party" were to erupt in front of the Obamas' house some night to raise awareness about -- say -- the unmasking and leaking of American citizens' names from intelligence reports. I'm sure "the internet" would explode in ecstasy to see the neighbors smiling and clapping along with the Trumpies -- especially if they were doing it with panache!

...because the best way to persuade someone to take your side on an issue is to hold a queer dance party in front of their private residence.

One month ago today, President Trump tweeted, "Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my "wires tapped" in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!"

I read the tweet, finished my coffee, and an hour later explained to my readers exactly what Trump did.

Hate to say I told you so. But I did.

Oh whom am I kidding? I love saying I told you so.

From that first post -- "Obama wire-tapped Trump Tower" -- forward, I have offered mine observations on Obamagate.

And I told you so.

From that first post:

President Trump offered no "proof," which should fake the Fake News media into jumping all over him. Then, when the Trump-is-crazy calls reach a peak, boom, out comes the proof that Obama indeed used the power of his office to spy on a political opponent.

Like clockwork, the media hopped on the story, portraying President Trump as a madman.

Wednesday, April 05, 2017

An 18-year-old South Carolina man arrested last week on an ISIS-related charge dreamed of replicating the Orlando, Fla., massacre but decided he could better serve by joining the terrorist group in the Middle East where he could kill Americans, the FBI says.

The problem is that for Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s bravery to be effective depends on the tour promoters’ bravery. And the tour promoters’ bravery depends on whichever hotel group she’s booked with to be brave. And the hotel group’s bravery depends on whichever corporate entity owns the event venues to be brave. And the corporate entity’s bravery depends on the insurers’ bravery. And the insurers’ bravery depends on someone ponying up an extra gazillion dollars for security costs. And suddenly for the cost of a bare-bones speech by one brave woman you could mount The Phantom Of The Opera meets Avatar on ice and still come out ahead. (…)

And in another ten years? Douglas, Ayaan and I will still enjoy theoretical freedom of speech but, to exercise it, we’ll have to meet in an abandoned mine-shaft an hour south of Cloncurry, speaking to seven personally invited guests driven there blindfolded. The marketplace of ideas, from Canberra to Copenhagen, is shrinking fast. To quote Laura Rosen Cohen yet again: “Security” is the new “shut up”.

Before FISA, there really were no limits on what could be intercepted by intelligence agencies. This was abused over and over again, usually by the FBI, which used national security as a reason to intercept phone conversations of pretty much anyone who was thought to present some kind of a threat.

Even at the time FISA passed, though, civil libertarians were warning that there was little real protection against the Government using the information they collect maliciously. The problem goes back to the basics: you need to make sure that the people with access to the collected data were thoroughly checked and could be trusted.

In the United States, though, there’s a significant loophole, called “an election.”

Necessarily, when we elect a president, the president has complete access to any data — the president is the authority who decides what data is to be protected, and with what rigor. The president’s political appointees, just as necessarily, must have the same access. Our only real protection from illicit disclosure by these insiders is the degree to which they can be trusted. An unscrupulous political appointee on the president’s national security staff can obtain anything and leak anything.

In the Obama administration, scruples about information security were notably lacking. We saw it with the Clinton emails, where information security procedures were openly flouted, and where, frankly, multiple felonious violations of the espionage went unpunished.

And we’re seeing it now: Susan Rice, and probably a number of others, violated the provisions of FISA, and certainly, with no reasonable doubt violated the privacy of at least one U.S. Person.

FISA is coming up for renewal not too long from now, and FISA’s opponents have got a new and very strong argument that the government cannot be trusted with the power to intercept U.S. Persons communications.

If FISA were eliminated, the U.S. would lose a valuable tool — we really do need to be able to intercept communications within the U.S., for both state and non-state (read “terrorist”) actors. But for Americans to be able to trust their government with these surveillance powers, we have got to be able to trust that unscrupulous political appointees are deterred, and that illicit actions will be punished.

Yes, political abuse is always the threat, and when it’s not punished it becomes a much greater threat. And Charlie’s right that if there’s no accountability here, it’s going to be much harder to muster support for keeping FISA.

Glenn Reynolds on charlie Martin on Team Obama's spying on political opponents.

The idea that Democrats are trying to rescue the House from too much partisanship is, of course, absurd. There is still no proof behind the allegations the Trump campaign colluded with Russian hackers, an allegation which is once again trotted out in this letter. The allegation itself has become a means to an end: to keep the attack on the administration going and collect as many Republican scalps along the way as possible. “This is about country, not party,” would sound less like a laugh line if Democrats would stop using these accusations as a cudgel against Republicans in the media. Instead, we have House Democrats continually talking up collusion and even impeachment in advance of any proof.

When Democrats bleat that it's about country, not party, you can bet that it's about their party not the country. They're in bad trouble and they know it. Spying on your political opponents has been a crime since before Watergate.

The Susan Rice Stroy

All these months, it turns out, it was his right-hand hatchet gal and exposed serial prevaricator Susan Rice who was behind the scenes in his administration working all the levers of the most powerful espionage machine on planet Earth to spy on Mr. Obama’s political enemies.

This is jaw-dropping, bombshell information.

Not because it reveals Susan “Benghazi was about a video” Rice to be a liar. We already knew that.

Not because it exposed the Obama administration as the most nakedly partisan presidency in modern history, willing to use even the most sacred powers of the federal government for political purposes. We already knew that too.

What is so astonishing about the revelation that Ms. Rice was the one unmasking Donald Trump and his campaign before, during and after he won the presidency is that it doesn’t get any closer to Barack Obama himself.

Ms. Rice was Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, one of his closest aides. They spoke all the time. She worked directly for him. Here she was spying on Mr. Obama’s political enemies while in daily contact with him at the very height of the most contentious presidential election in memory. You don’t think she and the president discussed this?

The revelation that Ms. Rice was the operator behind the spying answers just one question. But it raises a thousand more.

When, exactly, did Ms. Rice start using the U.S. government’s spy operation as a weapon against Mr. Obama’s political opponents?

What conversations did she have with the president about the intel gleaned about Mr. Trump and other political enemies of Mr. Obama?

As was asked of an earlier president amid far smaller crimes: What did the president know, and when did he know it?

What other opponents running for the Republican nomination was the Obama administration spying on? Were any of those political enemies “unmasked” and disseminated across government agencies? Was any of that intelligence leaked to the press?

Did the Obama administration spy on Sen. Bernie Sanders during the long, messy Democratic primary, when the Vermont socialist refused to get out of the way for Hillary Clinton? Remember, we now know the lengths the entire Democratic National Committee went to rig that primary for Mrs. Clinton.

If there was nothing wrong with “unmasking” the identities of Mr. Obama’s political opponents and disseminating the intel, Ms. Rice, why did you flat out lie about it on national television last month?

“I know nothing about this” is not exactly a robust defense of one’s actions.

Most of the media, of course, is so desperate to destroy Mr. Trump and cover up anything that might reflect poorly on Mr. Obama that they would rather talk about phantom “Russia” connections instead.

Fine. Investigate Russia all you want. Even if that inquiry bears fruit, it will be about as scandalous as Richard Nixon going to China. But an administration actively spying on political opponents during a presidential election, unmasking U.S. citizens and then punishing them with selective leaks to the press? That is a real scandal.

And a constitution crisis that raises dire questions about whether any American citizen is safe from the espionage thuggery of the politically powerful.

Strong arm rule, political surveillance and the show trial threatens to replace the orderly alternation at power which characterized elective government. Watching the Beltway is now disturbingly like watching an unfolding power struggle at the Kremlin. Richard Arenberg writing in the Hill asks: "is there any hope of pulling out of the "nuclear option" death spiral before the Senate inflicts permanent damage upon itself and the Supreme Court?" There's growing concern the acrimony will permanently poison the atmosphere by locking both parties into a cycle of retaliation.

Senate Democrats set the stage for a confrontation this week that likely will change how Washington works, as they assembled more than enough votes to block President Donald Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee under the current rules. ...

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made clear Gorsuch will be confirmed one way or the other -- even if that means further eroding decades of Senate traditions that have forced the majority to compromise. To deliver on his promise, McConnell is likely to invoke what’s known as the “nuclear option” -- changing Senate rules to eliminate the 60-vote threshold and end filibusters on high court nominees. McCain said he will vote for the rule change.

“I guarantee you, just as the Democrats regretted what Harry Reid did, we will regret doing this,” McCain of Arizona told reporters. He was referring to then-Democratic leader Harry Reid’s decision in 2013 to end the filibuster for lower-court and executive-branch nominees.

Hope looks like it just left town. To boot there are now allegations that Susan Rice actively requested the "unmasking" of Trump campaign and transition official's names from intelligence reports. That makes a "dual track investigation" inevitable according to law professor William Jacobson. "I don’t see how the Obama administration does not now become a target of congressional investigation after this revelation." Both sides are in a race to see who can jail or politically cripple the other side first. Although the pawns will fall first the game won't end until checkmate traps one of the two rival kings.

’m sure you’ve noticed that conservatives and Republicans (no, they are not necessarily the same) enjoy playing the counter-factual game of “What if?”

What if a Republican had presided over Benghazi instead of Ms. “At-this-point-What-Difference-Does-It-Make” Clinton?

What if a Republican administration had intervened to prevent Arizona from enforcing federal immigration laws?

What if a Republican had decided to enforce provisions of the Affordable Care Act selectively, omitting, for the time being, those that were politically inexpedient?

What if a Republican had made a deal with Iran that all-but guaranteed their acquisition of nuclear weapons within a few years?

What if a Republican administration had spied on a rival presidential candidate, who then, to the surprise of wise men everywhere, became the disfavored president-elect?

What if a Republican administration had illegally leaked, from classified intelligence reports, the names of private citizens to the media?

What if, what if, what if?

You know the answer: The well-oiled outrage machine of the media-industrial complex would have been wheeled into action. Oh my God, Mitt Romney once carried his pet dog on the roof of his car! Can you believe it? There are reports that he was mean to a kid in his high school! Obviously the heartless bastard is not qualified to be president. When asked in 2012 what was the most serious national security America faced, he said Russia. Russia! What a rube. And there was Barack Hussein Obama, really letting him have it: Now the 1980s are calling and asking for their foreign policy back! Yuk, yuk, yuk.

And here's more:

I write on Sunday night. By the end of the week, and very likely sooner, this story will either be definitively discredited (which I doubt) or we will be looking at one of the biggest political scandals in American history. If it is shown to be true, then the question is: will the ruling consensus get away with it? Or will the forces that brought Trump to power strike out and put an end to this arrogation of power to a largely unaccounted bureaucratic elite?

As I say, I think Ted Cruz was right that the “Trump-colluded-with-Russia” meme was a giant “nothing burger.” The “Obama tapped my wires” meme, however, which Trump dropped on March 4, is looking more and more like a five-course meal with all the fixings.

Sunday, April 02, 2017

‘Horrifying!” inveighed an indignant Hillary Clinton at the last presidential debate, less than three weeks before Election Day. What so horrified her? Donald Trump’s refusal to pledge that he would accept the legitimacy of the election.

Trump speculated that the electoral process could be rigged. Until he saw how it played out, the Republican nominee said, he could not concede that the result would be on the up-and-up.

Trump offered a three-part “rigging” claim.

There was the allegation for which he’d already been roundly derided: A foreign element could swing the election — specifically, “millions” of ineligible voters, a reference to illegal immigrants, the bane of his campaign. Further, there was the gross one-sidedness of the media’s campaign coverage — scathing when it came to him; between inattentive and fawning when it came to his opponent, whose considerable sins were airbrushed away. Finally, there was deep corruption: Clinton, he maintained, should not have been permitted to run given the significant evidence of felony misconduct in her mishandling of classified information.

Meanwhile, law-enforcement agencies of the Democratic administration bent over backwards to give her a pass, and congressional Democrats closed ranks around her — conducting themselves in committee hearings more like her defense lawyers than investigators searching for the truth.

A flabbergasted Clinton responded that she was shocked — horrified! — to hear Trump “talking down our democracy.” This was a top theme in her campaign’s closing days: The election was absolutely legitimate; Trump was traitorously condemnable for refusing to say so.

Of course, Clinton and the Democrats who parroted her would prefer that you forget that now. And given her strained relationship with the truth, they’re right to calculate that you’d never retain anything she said for very long. Nobody does. Corporate big wheels who paid to hear her vaporous speechifying couldn’t tell you a memorable thing she’d said after paying $250,000 for her “insights.”

The media-Democrat indictment of Trump’s election-rigging spiel was not rooted in patriotic commitment to the American democratic tradition of accepting election outcomes. They said what they said because they fully expected to win — all the polls said so! Hillary and her chums, Barack Obama included, would not abide a taint of illegitimacy affixing itself to her inevitable presidency.

Except she wasn’t so inevitable.

So now, there is just one very inconvenient problem for the “Russia hacked the election” narrative, the tireless media-Democrat harangue since November 8: Everything of substance that is known to the U.S. government about Russian meddling was already known in those pre-election weeks when Clinton and the Democrats were hailing the legitimacy of the process.

They’ve changed their tune not because the facts changed, but because they lost.

Saturday, April 01, 2017

LISTEN: BRET EASTON ELLIS’ EPIC LIBERAL SMACKDOWN

Barack Obama accomplished what Richard Nixon wanted to do.

Richard Nixon was forced from office because he tried, and failed, to use the IRS against his political enemies and because his "Plumbers" tried to wiretap the DNC. For this he was forced to resign his office. Both issues were part of the indictment drawn up by Congress to impeach Nixon who resigned before being impeached.

Barack Obama was much more successful. Whereas the IRS refused Nixon's orders to target his political enemies, Obama's IRS cheerfully took up Obama's cause and managed to effectively neuter the Tea Party movement by denying them tax exempt status. the Tea Party was an effective grass roots movemetn that was stalled by lack of funding as a direct result of the IRS actions against them. The IRS Director of the IRS Exempt Organizations division Lois Lerner, refused to testify before Congress and invoked her 5th Amendment right to refuse to answer on the ground that her answers might incriminate her. She retired and the Obama Justice Department took no further action.

The proximate cause of Nixon's demise was "Watergate," an attempt by the "Plumbers" to plant listening devices in the Watergate HQ of the DNC to find out who was leaking negative information to the press.

The Obama administration succeed where Nixon failed. They were able to listen in on many conversation by and about members of the Trump team and leak stories to the press that implied Trump was conspiring with Russia to win the election. The leaks were designed to imply the Trump was a Russian puppet but failed to stop his election. There is still no evidence that there was collusion between Trump and Vladimir Putin although Democrats have continued to make the charge.

There is no question that Trump and his staff have had their telephone conversations intercepted because numerous stories have appeared in the press either quoting, paraphrasing or characterizing those conversations. Unless the American an British press are lying about the leaks they have received from members of the Obama Administration, there is no question that Trump's calls have been intercepted. The only question of fact is whether these phone calls were tapped as an "incidental" byproduct of foreign surveillance or if the members of the Trump team were the targets of these interceptions.

But the fact is that the acts that forced Nixon to resign were accomplished by Obama with no effect on him finishing his term.

There are two primary reasons for the difference in the result.

The press. The press hated Nixon and were ready and willing to do anything to remove their political enemy from office. First. he was a Republican. Second, he was an anti-Communist who defeated one of their favorites, Helen Douglas, for which they never forgave him. Third, he never hid his disdain for them. Contrast this with the press' adoration of obama, a man who they declare spotless in scandal department.

Republican morality. Republicans, by and large, observe an Judeo-Christian morality. Nixon could not be removed from office unless Republicans voted for his impeachment and conviction. When the "Watergate Tapes" were played, Republican leaders decided that the ethics revealed by Nixon reflected a morality that they could not support in a President. They formed a committee to tell Nixon he had to resign for the good of the country. Contrast that with the tribal ethics of Democrats during the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Democrats in Congress exhibit a tribal loyalty to their party which differs from the religious based "universal" morality that Republicans - by and large- adhere to. This is not to imply that Republicans are Boy Scouts, but they understand that there is a moral standard that is above loyalty to the tribe.